This is ratio of weight in kilograms to the square of height in meters. This parameter helps doctors judge whether the person will suffer from heart disease or strokes. Those having a BMI of 25-29.9 are considered overweight and those with a BMI of 30 are considered obese. However, this parameter is not always accurate in measuring belly fat. In fact, you can measure your belly fat with a measuring tape in front of the mirror, and set your own targets to reduce belly fat. Looking at the mirror and checking regularly will motivate you to lose the unhealthy fat lining your abdomen.
Burn more energy as heat. Expose yourself to cold temperatures regularly to make your body burn off more energy as heat. Drink ice water, take cold showers, keep your bedroom cool, or hold an ice pack to your upper back. Eating spicy foods also makes you produce more heat- having a slice of cold cut meat sprinkled with cayenne pepper right before a cold shower can significantly accelerate fat burning.
Insulin (in-suh-lin): A hormone made by the cells in your pancreas. Insulin helps your body store the glucose (sugar) from your meals. If you have diabetes and your pancreas is unable to make enough of this hormone, you may be prescribed medicines to help your liver make more or make your muscles more sensitive to the available insulin. If these medicines are not enough, you may be prescribed insulin shots.
Want to blow away your belly without logging months of mind-numbing hours on the treadmill? High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) will kickstart your metabolism like no other workout, burning more than twice the calories as a lighter and longer session, according to a study from Southern Illinois University. And the total amount of time you need to dedicate to HIIT: 20 minutes. It really is the least time exercising for the biggest results.
Verreijen, A. M., Engberink, M. F., Memelink, R. G., van der Plas, S. E., Visser, M., & Weijs, P. J. M. (2017, February 6). Effect of a high protein diet and/or resistance exercise on the preservation of fat free mass during weight loss in overweight and obese older adults: A randomized controlled trial. Nutrition Journal, 16(1), 10. Retrieved from https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12937-017-0229-6

It depends on your goals and preferences. Some weight training will be beneficial in any regimen as it'll help you build lean muscle mass, increase the amount of calories you burn daily, and aiding in body fat management. However, the total number of weight training days can be altered between 2-6 depending on what form of exercise you actually enjoy doing.

Eating sugar, especially refined sugars added to sweeten food and beverages, is a leading contributing factor to visceral fat. The glucose and fructose that come from sugar are simple carbohydrates that get quickly absorbed into the bloodstream and metabolized to release energy. When there’s excess intake, they get converted to glycogen to be stored in fat tissue. Eating a lot of sugar also spikes your blood sugar, which triggers insulin to be released in large amounts, potentially leading to a condition called insulin resistance that’s associated with metabolic syndrome. Cutting out all sweetened foods and drinks, including fruit juices, is one of the best things you can do today to lose belly fat fast. Learn to enjoy small amounts of natural sweeteners such as fresh fruit, raw honey, dates, and coconut crystals. Don’t be tempted by these other 15 of the worst foods for your belly.
The Shred Diet is a cycle diet, which means that if you haven’t hit your goal weight after six weeks, you can repeat the cycle of weeks in a different order. Once you’ve hit your target weight, you’ll be in the maintenance phase, which means that every 4 weeks you choose any week of the diet and follow its plan for 7 days. Once you’ve kept the weight off for a period of six months, you can commit to a week of the cycle to do every eight weeks, like a tune-up for your metabolism.
Getting more fiber into your diet, especially soluble fiber found in oats, chia seeds, legumes, vegetables, and fruits, can help reduce fat accumulation in the abdominal area. Psyllium husk is another great source of fiber—and has zero calories. Fiber swells up with water, increasing the bulk of your stomach contents and giving you a feeling of fullness. It also reduces fat absorption from food by binding with bile acids required for the digestion of dietary fats. Fiber can also bind with sugars and other carbohydrates, delaying or reducing their absorption into the bloodstream.
Salads are the go-to diet food, you’re probably thinking. How could they possibly keep me from losing weight? The problem is with what you put on the salad. “Salad items like nuts, fruits, some dressings and extras like croutons and cran-raisins, can actually add an extra 300-400 calories to the meal,” says Angela Godwin, FNP-BC MSN, clinical instructor at the NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing. “Instead, greens and proteins can make a salad more filling with less fat.” Also, steer clear of “lite” salad dressings that secretly have high sugar content. Look out for these other weight-loss mistakes nearly everyone makes.
Earlier, belly fat was considered healthy; it was perceived as a reservoir of adipose tissues that could be utilized when a person needed extra energy. With time, the views have changed. Researchers state that excess belly fat triggers chronic cardiovascular diseases. So, it is important to measure belly fat and check how much you need to reduce. Here are some parameters to measure your waistline.
It’s called a beer belly for a reason! Alcohol consumption has long been associated with abdominal obesity and can easily derail your fat-loss efforts. Alcohol is not only high in calories, but it’s the body’s preferred fuel, so when you drink it, the other macronutrients in your food will be sent into storage (aka your belly, or possibly your thighs or butt). Alcohol is also notorious for lowering your self-control and inhibitions, so you can easily end up eating and drinking too much. Check out these home remedies that help you lose belly fat.
Whether or not you’re specifically aiming to cut carbs, most of us consume unhealthy amounts of sugar and refined carbohydrates such as white bread, pizza dough, pasta, pastries, white flour, white rice, and sweetened breakfast cereals. Replacing refined carbs with their whole-grain counterparts and eliminating candy and desserts is only part of the solution, though. Sugar is hidden in foods as diverse as canned soups and vegetables, pasta sauce, margarine, and many reduced fat foods. Since your body gets all it needs from sugar naturally occurring in food, all this added sugar amounts to nothing but a lot of empty calories and unhealthy spikes in your blood glucose.
When you understand how lack of sleep contributes to obesity, you’ll realize how important it is to get good sleep every night. Sleep regulates endocrine function, maintaining the right balance between the hunger hormone ghrelin and the satiety hormone leptin. Sleep deprivation increases appetite, insulin resistance, and the stress hormone cortisol, all of which contribute to fat accumulation in the body. Make sure that you get at least seven to eight hours of sleep every night. Don’t miss these other 42 fast and easy ways to lose weight.
A different way of viewing weight loss identifies the problem as not one of consuming too many calories, but rather the way the body accumulates fat after consuming carbohydrates—in particular the role of the hormone insulin. When you eat a meal, carbohydrates from the food enter your bloodstream as glucose. In order to keep your blood sugar levels in check, your body always burns off this glucose before it burns off fat from a meal.
Your body needs a certain amount of essential vitamins and minerals to function properly. What happens when you don’t get enough of them? What happens when you eat too little food, or when the food you eat isn’t sufficiently nutritious? Perhaps our bodies catch on and reply by increasing hunger levels. After all – if we eat more, we increase the chances of consuming enough of whatever nutrient we are lacking.

Aloe juice aka aloe water has been touted as the new coconut water. The bulk of aloe juice is made with aloe vera gel, water, or tea, and then sweeteners and natural flavors may be added. While aloe vera juice supposedly has health benefits, like weight loss and anti-aging properties, none of these claims have ever been scientifically proven. “Although aloe vera does contain high amounts of antioxidants, it has a slightly bitter, citrus-like flavor which is very difficult to drink on its own,” says Amidor. “It also has diuretic properties, which if taken in large amounts, can lead to loss of potassium from your body, which is potentially dangerous.”

Control Your Environments. Another simple strategy to help cut calories is to control your environment -- everything from stocking your kitchen with lots of healthy options to choosing the right restaurants. That means avoiding the temptation by staying away from all-you-can-eat restaurants. And when it comes to parties, "eat a healthy snack before so you won't be starving, and be selective when you fill your plate at the buffet," suggests Ward. Before going back for more food, wait at least 15 minutes and have a big glass of water.

Forgive yourself. So you were going to have one cracker with spray cheese on it and the next thing you know the can's pumping air and the box is empty? Drink some water, brush your teeth, and move on. Everyone who's ever tried to lose weight has found it challenging. When you slip up, the best idea is to get right back on track and don't look back.

Have you ever decided to skip a meal to cut back on your daily calorie count? Despite saving a few calories in the moment, this strategy almost always backfires. When you skip breakfast, or any meal, you'll begin to experience excessive hunger that can lead to craving unhealthy foods—and lots of them. You may also eat faster than you normally do after skipping a meal, causing you to miss the warning signs that you're full and resulting in overeating.
Make sure to program your cardio exercise in with your weight training the right way, though — a 2017 study found that performing cardio and weight training workouts on alternate days was far more effective for burning belly fat than stacking the workouts on top of each other in the same session. Put the two together, and watch that unhealthy midsection shrink.

Which leads us to point number two: If you want to lose belly fat, you'll need to lose weight. If you stick to the following plan, you won't have to lose as much weight as you might think because your body will burn more fat for energy, but still. Reducing your body fat percentage will require losing some weight. Don't go into this thinking you won't have to lose weight, because that's the surest way to fail.

After your last training session (Wednesday, in this example, two full days before Saturday’s event), eat two to three grams of carbs per pound of body weight for the rest of the day. If you train at night and it’s hard to eat enough carbs before bed, you can split up the total and eat the rest of the carbs on Thursday night. Insulin sensitivity remains high for 48 hours post- workout, so glycogen will still go to your muscles. Otherwise, on Thursday, go back on the diet prescribed in Step 2.
Fiber works its weight loss magic in multiple ways. It helps you feel fuller, longer so eating fiber-rich foods is the dieting equivalent of working smarter, not harder. Plus, fiber takes a long time to digest, so fiber-rich foods don’t cause spikes in blood sugar that can send your insulin levels soaring. On the other hand, when you eat the so-called bad carbs (the refined or sugary ones that lack fiber), you may wind up with an insulin response that promotes fat storage. The takeaway: More fiber equals less fat storage.

As said before, measuring your waist with the tape is the easiest way to check belly fat. Measure your torso at the level of your navel. As per the official guidelines, measure your abdomen from just above the hip bone or the iliac crest, just where it intersects the line dropping down from the middle of the right armpit. Breathe normally while taking the measurement, and don’t hold the measuring tape too tight against the skin. Those with a waist size more than 33 inches are at risk of developing chronic heart disease.

There’s one caveat, though: Don’t train your abs. (You’re welcome.) While you need to work abs most weeks, the point of workouts at this stage is to get the muscles that pump up well to swell further with increased glycogen storage. Since abs don’t get pumped like biceps or shoulders, it doesn’t make sense to drive glycogen into them—in fact, doing so can cause them to inflate too much, blurring definition.
So how does this work? A quick run-through: The first tip was to eat low carb. This is because a low-carb diet lowers your levels of the fat-storing hormone insulin, allowing your fat deposits to shrink and release their stored energy. This tends to cause you to want to consume fewer calories than you expend – without hunger – and lose weight. Several of the tips mentioned above are about fine-tuning your diet to better this effect.
Mindfulness matters. “If you slow down and stop just mindless eating, you often realize you don’t need to eat as much as you thought you did; you’re already full,” said Dr. Steinbaum.” Part of this is watching portion sizes, which have ballooned in restaurants over the past 40 years, leading adults to consume an average of 300 more calories per day now than they did in 1985. Did you know that one serving of bread is actually just one slice? Or one serving of pasta or rice is just half a cup? And a serving of cheese is only two ounces, or the size of a domino? You’re probably eating much more than you realized. “There have been multiple studies that see keeping a food journal is effective,” said Dr. Steinbaum. “When you start paying attention, you can really see what you’re doing.”
And that’s not just the junk food sabotaging your diet, or the time suckers keeping you from working out. We’re also talking about the fad diets, fitness trends and questionable studies that have made reaching and maintaining a healthy weight more confusing than ever by promising this superfood or that super intense workout is the quick fix to tip the scale in your favor. (They’ve also spawned a $66 billion weight loss market.)
If you eat a carbohydrate-rich meal (lots of pasta, rice, bread, or French fries, for example), your body releases insulin to help with the influx of all this glucose into your blood. As well as regulating blood sugar levels, insulin does two things: It prevents your fat cells from releasing fat for the body to burn as fuel (because its priority is to burn off the glucose) and it creates more fat cells for storing everything that your body can’t burn off. The result is that you gain weight and your body now requires more fuel to burn, so you eat more. Since insulin only burns carbohydrates, you crave carbs and so begins a vicious cycle of consuming carbs and gaining weight. To lose weight, the reasoning goes, you need to break this cycle by reducing carbs.
Too little sleep or too much sleep can throw your stress and regulatory hormones out of whack, and may lead to weight gain. A single night of sleep deprivation can increase levels of ghrelin (a hormone that promotes hunger), making you more likely to overeat the next day. Reduced sleep may also lead to fatigue during the day (duh) and less physical activity, which may be another reason why people who regularly don't get enough sleep tend to gain weight.
After somewhere between three and five hours, your body stops processing its last meal. There's nothing left to absorb, so insulin levels naturally decrease. Then, somewhere between eight and 12 hours after that last meal, your body starts burning stored fat. (Why don't you start burning fat sooner? Biology is sometimes a pain in the ass; it's like our bodies will do anything to hang on to fat.)

Tempting as that post-workout shower may be, making time to hold a static stretch at the end of your workout can increase your muscle mass by as much as 13 per cent, according to US research. How? It has much the same effect on your muscles as resistance training, a study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology found. Both cause micro tears that prompt the manufacture of muscle fibres. Stretch yourself swole.

Dr. Ian Smith is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling books, SHRED: THE REVOLUTIONARY DIET, and SUPER SHRED: The Big Results Diet, and BLAST THE SUGAR OUT. Dr. Smith’s highly anticipated newest book, The Clean 20, became an instant New York Times best seller, helping hundreds of thousands of people reduce bad sugars from their diet, lose weight, lower blood sugar levels, and cut the cravings. Read More
That’s because women tend to store more temporary fat in their bellies. “The fat stores are gained and lost,” says Lawrence Cheskin, MD, chair of the department of nutrition and food studies at George Mason University and director of the Johns Hopkins Weight Management Center. “By and large, belly fat comes off easier in the sense that it comes off first. That’s where a good amount of the fat is lost from.”
In what is perhaps the biggest buzzkill of all time, sex doesn’t quite count as cardio or burn a significant amount of calories: Women burn about 3.6 per minute. "It’s still a good idea," Dr. Seltzer says, citing the activity’s other benefits, like increasing the output of the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine, which naturally reduce food cravings.
Tapsell, L. C., Dunning, A., Warensjo, E., Lyons-Wall, P., & Dehlsen, K. (2014). Effects of vegetable consumption on weight loss: A review of the evidence with implications for design of randomized controlled trials [Abstract]. Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, 54(12), 1529–1538. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24580555
"When we’re lacking in sleep, our body’s hormones get thrown off balance which can impact our hunger levels the next day. We all have two hormones that affect our appetite: ghrelin and leptin. When we don’t get enough sleep, our ghrelin levels (the hormone that makes us feel hungry) rise, and our leptin levels (the hormone that makes us feel full) drop. This means that when we’re awake, we tend to eat more but feel less satisfied. Try going to bed a little earlier than usual to avoid this imbalance and remember to remove any distractions that might prevent you from nodding off."